This is a recorded ethnographic interview used to examine serendipity, chance, and naivety as constituent parts of anthropological fieldwork method, alongside the professionalized apparatus of research ethics (informed consent, confidentiality) and the structuring role of funding bodies in setting disciplinary agendas. Its central theoretical claim is that serendipity may be an artifact of the discipline's single-site, single-researcher convention: when the same site is restudied by a differently positioned researcher, personal variables (gender, ethnicity, language, personality) separate from durable local structures, so what one fieldworker experiences as chance becomes legible as structure. It belongs to the methodology and reflexive-anthropology subfield of social anthropology, and extends into the anthropology of infrastructure and the discipline's contested capacity for future-oriented, predictive claims.
This is a recorded ethnographic interview used to examine serendipity, chance, and naivety as constituent parts of anthropological fieldwork method, alongside the professionalized apparatus of resear…